


too deep a poison

by curiositykilled



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Angst, Betrayal, F/M, Gen, Kuron is Shiro (Voltron)'s Clone, Poisoning, Psychological Trauma, Shiro (Voltron) Has PTSD - Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, Sick Character, Unrequited Love
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-23
Updated: 2020-04-26
Packaged: 2021-03-02 00:20:08
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 4,903
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23796022
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/curiositykilled/pseuds/curiositykilled
Summary: “Will you stay?” he asks.Shiro pauses in the doorway, hand resting on the frame. He dips his head, drawing taut the line of his neck and shoulders.“Not this time.”
Relationships: Keith & Shiro (Voltron)
Comments: 2
Kudos: 18





	1. Chapter 1

“How long have you been like this?”

His voice comes out flat, question turned into a command by the cold anger steeling it. Keith hunches his shoulders, curls more in on himself. He’s heard Shiro angry plenty of times, a couple times at him, but it makes his gut turn over and twist, hurt doubling down on the feverish ache already spread throughout his body.

“A while,” he says, churlish.

Time’s been fuzzy, oil-slick through his grasp, but Shiro’s tone has turned him newly sullen, too. He doesn’t need a lecture on how he should have gone to the medbay after the Blades’ latest mission. It hadn’t been so bad in the beginning.

He doesn’t look up as Shiro’s footsteps thud across the floor. Ever since the arena, Shiro’s footsteps have been soft and forward on his feet, rolling ball-to-heel like a cat. Now, though, little reverberations run through the floor with the strike of his bootheels. Keith doesn’t have to look up to know Shiro’s in his armor; he can feel the weight of it in his clipped steps. He pauses beside the bed, and his gaze falls like a lead weight on the back of Keith’s head.

“Are you going to turn over?” Shiro asks.

He wants to let his silence answer, wants to make Shiro read the answer in his hunched back and hidden face, but he’s still got enough presence of mind to feel embarrassed at the prospect. He rolls over.

The look Shiro gives him isn’t particularly soft of kind; there’s no comfort in the clinical way his eyes scan over Keith’s trembling limbs, the hair stuck to his sweaty forehead. His lips purse, twist to the left as if displeased.

“Come on,” he says, holding out his hand.

Frowning, Keith stares at the hand in incomprehension. Shiro sighs, flexing his hand as if in frustration.

“You need a shower,” he says, “and a change of sheets.”

Oh. Keith nods slightly before catching himself, nausea roiling up his throat. He sits up and fumbles his legs out of the sheets to set his feet on the floor. Taking Shiro’s hand, he pushes off the bed with his other — and immediately stumbles past Shiro by a too-long step, legs wobbling and weak beneath him. Shiro crouches as he goes down, catching Keith’s shoulders before he can hit the ground. He huffs out a breath, lips thinned in annoyance, and adjusts his grip to slide his arms around Keith’s shoulders and under his knees.

“No, Shiro—” Keith starts, but Shiro’s already straightened, hiking Keith up in his arms.

The shift in orientation makes his head spin, and he squeezes his eyes shut, turning into Shiro’s chest like a child hiding from the light. Shiro doesn’t say anything, but he tenses slightly, arms tightening under Keith’s weight, and there’s a beat before he moves again. Hands clutched up by his throat, Keith bites back the tears that suddenly threaten him — at how twisted and uneasy his belly feels, at how distant Shiro’s made himself, at how helpless and aching he feels with his nose pressed against the hard surface of Shiro’s armor.

It’s not a long walk to the showers — they’re centered between the bedrooms on this floor — but it’s long enough that Keith feels almost deprived when Shiro peels him away to set him down on the bench. He slumps there, spent. Leaning his elbows on his thighs, he stares at the floor with half-focused eyes and swallows down the bile that rose in his throat at the change in levels again.

He hears more than sees Shiro strip off his armor; the bracers thunk against the hard polymer bench, then the cuirass. He frowns but can’t make himself lift his head.

There’s a small pause before bare feet pad into his line of vision. From this angle, he can trace the scars littering even this part of Shiro’s body: a deep purple oval on the top of one foot from a weapon tipped in alien poison; half the pinky toe missing from his left; the silver-pink edges of scars curling around his ankle and disappearing up under the dark fabric of his undersuit.

“Straighten up.”

Shiro’s hands curl into the hem of Keith’s shirt as he pushes himself more upright, and the black t-shirt is dragged up and over his head. Sweat-soaked, it sticks to his face and clings to his arms as Shiro tugs it off. It’s cast aside with a damp flop, and Shiro kneels to hook fingers into Keith’s waistband and pull off his pajama pants. A flush that has little to do with the fever rises in Keith’s cheeks, and he looks away, mortified. How many times has he wanted them to be in this position? How many times has he fantasized about the feeling of Shiro’s hands slipping along his body?

Now, Shiro hoists him to his feet with one arm pulled over Shiro’s shoulders and they walk in tandem to the shower. Misery is a wet sack in Keith’s gut as Shiro positions them so that Keith’s back leans against his chest under the hot water. He’s not rough but methodical; there is nothing intimate about the way he massages shampoo into Keith’s hair or rubs down his chest and legs with a cloth. The water splatters against the sterile shower setting and they say nothing at all.

Turning him around, Shiro lets Keith hold onto his shoulders as he sets to washing his shoulders and back. He crouches to wash the backs of his legs, and Keith swallows and holds a little tighter. Hot water drips from his sodden bangs to run down his forehead and cheeks, and he calls it a disguise for the tears that slip burning from his eyes. Shiro straightens up and Keith leans into him, presses his face to his collarbone as Shiro sets to rinsing them off.

“I’m sorry,” he mumbles.

Even with the water spattering around them and Keith’s voice muffled by Shiro’s body, he knows Shiro heard him. Ever since he came back, ever since Allura cradled his soul and poured it back into his own body, he’s been different — sharper. The Black Lion changed him, left him marked. His sight’s better, reflexes faster, hearing keener.

“It’s fine,” he says now, low.

“No, I mean for” — Keith swallows, pushes back enough to meet Shiro’s eyes. His own are stinging now, and he knows the shower spray can’t hide the redness that’s there — “for not searching for you. For leaving you out there.”

Shiro looks away, but his jaw is clenched tight. A muscle at the back bulges, shifts under his skin.

“I’m sorry for abandoning you,” he says and his voice breaks.

He hates himself for the crack, for the weakness. This isn’t about him; this isn’t supposed to be about him. Shiro shouldn’t be helping him at all, much less comforting him for this.

Shiro sighs, chest sinking under Keith’s hands. He looks to Keith, finally, and there is a new tiredness heavy in the dark of his eyes.

“What do you want me to say?” he asks.

His bangs stick to his forehead, the shock of white turned grey by the water. Keith’s hand itches to reach up and brush them out of his eyes, but he knows better than to try. He had that right once, that privilege to casually invade Shiro’s space and be welcomed closer. He lost it.

“You — all of you — believed a stranger was me,” Shiro continues. “You let him in and brushed off all the signs like they were nothing. I thought you knew me.”

He breaks off, looks away. Under his words is a deeper ache, and Keith bites his bottom lip to stop its trembling. He does know Shiro, he does — or he did, once. He knew him better than any living person when Shiro left for Kerberos. The first missing year created new gaps, but Shiro let him into some of those shadows at least, told him things that Keith knew he would never admit to the other paladins. Even then, he still knew him. Now, though — Keith swallows.

“I do,” he promises, voice strained. “I know you, Shiro. I just — I was distracted — I made a mistake.”

Shiro’s eyes are no kinder when he looks to Keith now.

“I called your name every time you stepped into the Black Lion,” he says. “I screamed for you until I couldn’t remember any word except your name.”

His words hit like a punch to Keith’s diaphragm. It would have been gentler if he’d coiled his prosthetic hand into a fist and slammed it into Keith’s belly with the force that can break apart steel.

“You didn’t listen.”

“I’m sorry,” Keith sobs. “Shiro, please, I’m sorry.”

His fingers have tightened into Shiro’s soaking-wet suit, and he can’t hold in the shaking sobs that rack his whole frame. They come like tides breaking on rocks, gasps that are swallowed in tears and the spray of the shower. Shiro meets his gaze, jaw shifting to the side just-so. The anger dissipates, turns to pity instead.

“You can’t fix this, Keith,” he says.

His tone is soft, so gentle it’s almost a kindness. Keith doesn’t want it. He wants Shiro to rail at him, to spit back all his anger and hurt. There would still be a chance there, still be the possibility that he could vent it all out and they could find each other again. This gentleness is a mercy killing.

“Shiro, no,” Keith pleads.

Reaching past him, Shiro flips off the shower and doesn’t meet Keith’s eyes as he shepherds him out of the shower. The tears have mostly stopped, turned to trembling shoulders and an ache in his chest deeper than any poison.

Shiro dries him off as efficiently as he washed him, and Keith is wrung dry of any energy to feel ashamed when he’s scooped up this time. Some of the queasiness seems to have eased, but it’s hard to say with the new knot of nausea tangling in his belly.

He leans against the wall, listless, as Shiro strips the sheets off his bed and tosses them into a pile in a corner before replacing them with the spare set in the drawer under the mattress. Once it’s made, he flips back the corner of the sheets and steers Keith over to sit down on the mattress. Pajamas are pulled on over his head and up his legs, and too quickly the whole ordeal is over and Shiro is straightening up as he directs Keith to go back to sleep.

Hunching up under the covers, Keith bites his lip as Shiro nudges the pile of dirty sheets over to the side more and moves toward the door. He wants, desperately, to fix this. He wants to make it right so badly he can feel it like a hand reached straight into his chest and tightening around his heart.

“Will you stay?” he asks.

Shiro pauses in the doorway, hand resting on the frame. He dips his head, drawing taut the line of his neck and shoulders.

“Not this time.”

He doesn’t look back as he straightens and steps through, and the door closes with a quiet hush. Behind him, Keith is left alone with the silence and the strangling guilt.


	2. unmaking

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> the unmaking of takashi shirogane

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> a sequel/fix-it was requested so here's an epilogue of sorts that's baaasically a fix-it but deals pretty heavily with Shiro's trauma from the astral plane so like, pls take of yourselves and heed the tags

_You are too hard on him._

He dropped the armor in a clattering heap onto his mattress. Black’s tone was mild, nonjudgmental. He still swatted at her presence like he could just brush it aside. The reply was a low rumble of something between amusement and annoyance. Dropping his hands to his hips, Shiro stared down at the pile, lips pursing.

She lingered in the back of his mind, unobtrusive but waiting. A surge of irritation rose hot and biter in his chest, and he shoved back a wordless tide of memories.

Time worked differently in the astral plane. Chemical reactions slowed to such a crawl that he could see individual electrons passing by, and simultaneously, entire universes bloomed and died in the space between heartbeats. Everything and nothing existed as one, impossible and indivisible.

Touch went irst, or at least it was the first he noticed. Suspended in nothingness, there was nothing to feel, and so he didn’t notice until, at some point in the eons and milliseconds, he realized he couldn’t call to mind what his armor felt like when eh ran his left hand over the still-gleaming plates. He could tell that it was there but nothing more. Smooth, chipped, cold, or hot — he couldn’t drag forward any memory even to remind him what those words meant beyond a dictionary definition.

He’d burned his hand when he first had the prosthesis and didn’t know anything of how to use it, and the scar still shone a muted pink across his palm. He remembered the pain, surprise, horror — but the sensation itself was absent. It was like watching someone else, on a screen: he sympathized but couldn’t imagine he feeling.

He’d panicked, then, at his first unmaking, but as his other senses slipped away, he stopped noticing. At some point, he couldn’t taste the food he conjured from the ether, whether it was the shitty hot dog that made him and Adam both sick at a local festival or the bubbling champagne they’d served for toasts at the Kerberos send-off. His body flickered away in stages, ashes on an unfelt wind.

Hearing and sight remained, sharped as the rest of him fell away. He knew no name or home, but he witnessed everything. There was no sound too soft, no movement too quick. He roamed nebulae, crossed black holes, bathed in the magnetic songs of the stars. The threads of existence unspooled before him, through him. Stardust strands led him across the infinite abyss, named him Witness to entropy and evolution. He was spread thin, diffuse, a spiderweb of sensation.

And then Keith stepped into Black.

A rubberband jolt snapped him back, an inverse reaction rushing all his backs back across space and time and into his own shape and self again. He gasped on the first breath he’d taken in centuries, and his first word came as a hosanna:

“Keith! Keith,” he wept, a hundred thousand sensations returning in an instant. “Keith.”

In the cockpit, Keith sat hunched in the pilot seat, hands stretched out tentatively over the grips. They dropped to them like a giving-way, like defeat.

“Shiro,” he’d whispered.

“Keith!” he’d called, surging forward. “Keith, I’m right here!”

The lights flickered, Black rumbling to life as he strained against eh boundary of this plane. She rose as if from slumber, an iridescent flame between rushing stars, and there was a flicker, a lull, before the tide crashed around him. She spoke in no human language, but the roar of her joy formed two words: _my Paladin, my Paladin._

Keith’s head dipped low, hands tightening over the controls. Frowning, Shiro took a step closer, silent on the metal floor.

“Please,” Keith begged, “no.”

“Keith—” Shiro started, reaching out, but Keith jerked from the chair and bolted, running through Shiro’s outstretched fingers.

He was left staring after, hand still extended and a new cold hollowing a cavity behind his ribs.

It was the same every time after. Keith took up the mantle reluctantly, and each time he forced himself into the cockpit, Shiro pushed all his energy into reaching out, into bridging the gap between planes. Black tried, in her own way, but Keith remained closed-off and desperate, and none of Shiro’s calls broke through.

Then, they found him.

It had almost been an accident. Shiro had been...well, whatever was the closest equivalent to meditating when he had neither body nor breath.

He’d pieced together what had happened, or at least thought he had. He remembered the fight with Zarkon, the explosion. Black had supplied him with replays of the moment over and over; looking at her memories, decrypting them, took a different lens and he felt himself shifting, adapting, as he kept watching until it started to make sense. In memory, her quintessence loomed leviathan-like around his, dwarfing even Zarkon and his machine. In the instant after the flash, her sword-edge wings flared wide and then snapped tight around his own. He vanished.

By his best guess, she’d absorbed his quintessence somehow in her effort to shield him. His body was either teleported somewhere, thrown off by the supernova of quintessence unleashed, or...dead. The thought didn’t send him reeling like he thought it might. He swallowed, took a deep breath with lungs he knew he didn’t have anymore, and let it be. Even if his body was dead, he was still, impossibly, alive and he wasn’t going to let go without a fight. If his body had been transported somewhere, then maybe they could find it through quintessence.

Black took to the form of a lion during these, only not quite. When he reached up to touch her mane, he could convince himself it felt coarse, thick, and she took the general form of a lion as if pulled from his own memory — but that was where the similarities ended. She glimmered like a constellation in motion, a shadow of light through which he could see the swirling stars on her other side, and her eyes burnt purple-white like twin stars. Still she towered over him, goliath. Her wings echoed in her movements, unseen, like water rippling over the cosmos.

Time slipped by in nothing-or-everything tumbles, but he’d found himself still instituting some kind of schedule. He didn’t get tired or sleep, but if he stretched himself too thin, worked too hard at their search for too long, he fell away again. It took three times of Black reaching out, catching the unraveling edges of his essence with her teeth and dragging him back, before she started growling at him when he started to push himself too hard. After that, he would rest by leaning against her flank and calling up old memories, a slideshow reminder of who he was and where he came from and what he was fighting for.

He was getting close to giving up for now; Black thumped her flail-like feathered tail down beside him as a warning, and he sighed.

“Yeah, just…a little longer,” he said.

The rumble she gave wasn’t exactly happy, but she settled back. She had the strength to pull him out of this at any point, he knew. He closed his eyes and stretched out again.

There — a flicker.

He lunged, focusing all his will in that direction. It was faint, fading, but he recognized it, Black recognized it. Hope rushed up on him like a wave, surging up through his chest. It would be hard for the team to see his body if it was lifeless and still like he expected, but if they could recover it, resuscitate it, then maybe —

The ship glided into Black’s hangar and Keith leapt from the seat, sprinting down the length of the lion. His hope was a painful thing, such a sudden surge that mirrored the tenuous glitter in Shiro’s own heart. At last, at least, his heartbeat seemed to whisper.

The cockpit hinged open, and Keith was up in it in mere strides. He knelt, hands brushing the cheeks, the jawline. Shiro’s name spilled from his lips like pomegranate seeds. Tears ran thin tracks down his face, eyes alight with quivering hope as he scoured the still, blank face.

Shiro pulled back. This wasn’t him. This was — that was his face, but this was not him. Couldn’t Keith see it? The hair, too long for a year away; the details of the face, just at a slightly wrong angle. It was as if someone had tried to draw him but with only a single photo for reference. Surely, Keith could see it, surely he would —

Keith lifted a limp hand and pressed his lips to the bared knuckles, eyes scrunched tight in painful relief.

Horror grew roots in Shiro’s chest, twined between his ribs. If this stranger with his face existed, how many others did, too? What if he was not himself but one of them? How many times had he died? How many times had he woken believing himself narrowly saved when instead he was a simulacrum booting up for the first time?

He disappeared, for a while, after that.

Black cradled him, let him curl away from the world and into the stillness of nonexistence. She could give him no answer, could only tell him he was her paladin and not whether he was himself.

He sat down in the pilot’s seat.

Shiro unfurled inch by inch, anger itching red up his spine. How dare he, this fraud this charlatan this puppet — everything had been taken from Shiro and now he thought he was owed this, too. Snarling and vengeful, he slammed shut any connection the clone might try. He could not have Black. He could not have Shiro’s help. He didn’t deserve it.

“Please, people’s lives are at stake. Our friends need us.”

He pulled back. The clone didn’t know. He thought — Shiro looked away. Black nudged him gently, just a little pulse. She would follow him, but he knew what she wanted. Sighing, he closed his eyes and breathed in stardust and comet ash, hands curling into fists. _Fine._

The Black Lion awoke.

After that, it became a strange triad: Shiro, serving as the force and energy behind every flight; Black, the wings that allowed them to soar; and the clone, a grounding wire tethering them to the right plane. Throughout it all, Shiro felt his control strengthen, his senses integrate more fully with Black’s until they were nearly one and the same. Their edges blurred, glitched, fused into line. Throughout it all, the clone never noticed.

Neither did anyone else.

The anger that had awoken at the clone’s first entry smoldered in Shiro’s chest, hurt turned red and cutting. Every time the clone acted out, lashed out or made choices he never would, they all brushed it off as Shiro acting strangely. They made apologies to each other for him but never questioned it, never formed a pattern from the incidents. All of them believed he would do it: cut down Keith, undermine Allura, lash out at Lance.

Each betrayal stung, but the worst of all was Keith. He accepted it so readily, so openly and without question. His hands brushed over the clone’s, tender and careful, and when the clone pulled away, Keith accepted that, too. Shiro screamed for him, called out every time he approached Black or skimmed the edge of the astral plane. Keith turned away, and the Blades took him.

And then, after. Everyone still walked carefully around him, stole glances out of the corners of their eyes as if he were a wild animal and they didn’t know how he’d react. Irritation boiled over into anger, and he shut himself away. If they doubted him so much, if they were so quick to believe him this feral thing, then so be it. He was sharper now, adamantine and edged. His time in Black’s consciousness had left him with different senses, an altered understanding of experience. He had reforged himself alone in the nothingness.

Black nudged him, a push that brought him back to himself. He shot an annoyed look in the direction of the hangar, as if she could see it through all the walls and not just feel his irritation through their bond.

If he was too hard on Keith, then fine. It was what they all expected of him now, anyway. The universe needed Voltron to stay together, and he wouldn’t shirk that duty, but the family he thought he’d found, the home they’d made through each other — it had been taken from him, like everything else.

A low rumble was all the warning he had before a wave of memories rushed over him, shimmering technicolor like dragonfly wings. The team, weeping for him and struggling to limp forward. Keith, scouring the universe till he was ragged and spent. The lions calling out, reaching for their missing leader, for the hole gaping in Black’s essence.

They were Black’s memories, not his, and they shivered and glittered with senses he no longer possessed. They were followed by his own, by memories he hadn’t realized he’d stored.

The gasp, the rush, of being poured gently back into his own body — his body, his self, his _his his_ — and the warm hands pressed carefully to his temples. Keith’s face, the first thing he saw, those wide fearful eyes and the first word out of his mouth like a prayer: _Shiro._ Hands, the whole team reaching for him, each trying to find a way to help him stand. A thrumming undercurrent in each shaky voice and desperate hug.

He looked away, blinked away the images and found tears hot on his cheeks. Sensation was still overwhelming at times, after so long without it, but he found himself craving it all the same. He brushed his hand against fabric he’d felt a hundred thousand times just to feel it again, through water just to enjoy the simultaneous tickle of it on his skin as he watched it roll away. Now, he lifted his fingertips to brush away the tears and found the skin underneath fragile.

_They are hurting, too._

Yeah, fine. He got the message. Dropping down onto the edge of the mattress, he curled his arm around his belly and gritted his teeth against the gnawing hurt there. He knew, of course. He wasn’t an idiot. It was just… He curled his fingers into his palm till the rubber squeaked against the metal plate.

They stopped looking for him. They believed he would turn his back on all of them.

They believed he was found. They wanted so badly for it to be him that they would rather be hurt and abandoned than think him still gone.

Swallowing, he eased the clench of his fist. That red anger had burnt itself out, leaving behind something ashy and hollowed-out, like a tree struck by lightning. Tired hurt echoed in the space behind his ribs.

_How is he?_

Black rebuffed him with a mental snort, the closest thing to an arched eyebrow she could manage. She wasn’t going to make it easy on him. He could feel what she wanted, could sense the hum beneath her thoughts, but she didn’t push him. One way or another, this would be his choice.

He exhaled, slow, mindful of the way the air felt cool against his throat, how it whispered into the silent room. Releasing his hands, he brushed away the tears with the heel of his palm and stood.

The ship was quiet now, the hallways muted and lit only with the low lights tracking along the floor. His own footsteps barely made a noise, just little hushes of noise against the metal as he followed his own path back.

Keith had rolled over while he was gone, twisted the blankets around him till they coiled rope-like around his torso and legs. One hand dug into his pillow, knuckles blanched by the pressure. The other was bound up close to his chest by the blankets. Shiro paused on the threshold before taking a step inside and then another until he finally, carefully, lowered himself to the edge of the bed.

Keith’s hair was still damp when he brushed it back from his face, his skin soft against the backs of Shiro’s knuckles. His fever had broken already, his skin no longer hot and slick with sweat. He loosened the blankets just-so, just enough so he could breathe, and Keith gave a little whimper of noise, nestling deeper into the tangle. Reaching over, Shiro lifted his hand finger-by-finger from the fist it had formed around the corner of the pillow.

Huffing out some cross between a word and a growl, Keith jerked around to roll onto his other side. He curled inward once more, tight, and his knees pressed into the low of Shiro’s back. His head slid to the edge of the pillow, nestling into his own hand. The hand Shiro had freed dropped to hang over the edge, just shy of Shiro’s knee.

“Shiro,” he mumbled, but his eyes were not open and his voice was heavy with dreams.

Running his hand through his hair, Shiro smoothed it away from his face and let it trace along Keith’s cheek to pause over the scar curving fang-like over the edge of his jaw. He swallowed, breathed out. He brushed his thumbtip across it once and brought his hand away to fall into his lap. Sitting here, the hollow seemed to ease. It wasn’t contentment that took its place or even hope, but the first brushes of something like a salve pushed back the darkness.

Keith’s hands twitched, fingers flexing by Shiro’s knee. Reaching down, he slipped their hands together, palm-to-palm. Keith’s gave a little involuntary twitch before tightening, clamping down around Shiro’s as if grabbing hold of a lifeline. _Okay,_ he thought, closing his own fingers around Keith’s.

He closed his eyes, breathed deep. Keith’s heartbeat echoed his own, a sure and steady pulse. They were alive. They were together. They could figure out the rest.

“I’m here,” he said aloud.


End file.
